Today is a day where nothing gets done. I slept in. After getting up at 5 am originally. Far to early. I get up at 6:30 on a weekday. Instead of going to get a few more Halloween things for work, I got lunch and went grocery shopping. I suppose that counts as getting something done. I read half a book (Undead or Alive) and another that turned out to be a novella. The novella was an ARC. It turned out pretty good. Short, fast, tightly written paranormal mystery by the name of Hibernian Charm. Worth reading. Then I finally got around to doing one of my projects (canvas work, A Winter’s Night by Nancy’s Needle) and watching a movie while working on it. Spy Time. A spoof of spy movies from Spain. Aging spy in an era where old school spies are neither needed or wanted. Budget cuts mean they don’t really have the funding to do their thing. Only now one of the villains they put away has escaped and is after his son. He has to protect his son, the son’s bumbling best friend, and the son’s girlfriend who dumped him because he was too boring. Amusing movie if you don’t mind subtitles. I wanted to listen to the Spanish as I was watching it as I’m trying to relearn it. I took a semester in college and remember nearly nothing. I’ve been practicing on Duolingo. Basically, I only recognized a handful of words as the film went on.

I had heard wonderful things about the new Wonder Woman movie. This is after years and year of the movie and T.V. industry telling us that they just couldn’t market Wonder Woman and that not enough people would want to watch a show centered around a female super hero. It has proven so popular that I wasn’t able to see it until the third weekend it was out due to sold-out shows at the times that work best for me. Sold-out morning showing used to never happen. It is getting more common now.

But I spent a large part of the beginning of the show pissed off at the Christianization of the Greek Mythology in the movie. It was very pronounced in the start and even more obvious when Ares tells his own side of it. I really do hate it when movies butcher well-known mythology, and Greek Mythology is perhaps the most well-known in the western world.

Prometheus carving man from clay.

In Greek Mythology, Zeus doesn’t create mankind. Prometheus shapes man out of earth and Athena breathes life into him. Since most of the other good things were given to other creatures, he makes man to walk upright and gives man fire. Zeus is the one who actually didn’t like mankind. This is why Zeus created Pandora, the first woman. Giving her a box filled with misfortune and diseases because he knows that she will eventually become curious enough to open the box and release them on mankind. To top everything else off, in Greek Mythology, Zeus doesn’t create Amazons. They are actually the daughters of Ares and a nymph.

But in Wonder Woman, Zeus is clearly an allegory of the Judeo-Christian God and Ares is an allegory of Lucifer/Satan.

The world is a beautiful paradise and the gods rule it from on high, at the top of Mt.

Amazons

Olympus. Then Zeus creates mankind for the gods to rule over and everything is fine. Only Ares isn’t happy with man and corrupts them. So Zeus makes the Amazon’s to teach mankind love. And everything is good for a while, but then mankind goes back to his former ways.

Then follows a great war in the heavens in which almost all the gods are killed and a much weakened Ares ends up wandering the earth, whispering in the ears of mankind. He is trying to prove that man is not such a wonderful creation and that humans are not good at heart. That he has never had to corrupt anyone. He just points things out and people are free to do as they chose.

If it isn’t obvious, I will break it down.

Zeus, like the Christian God, makes man in his own image.

Zeus makes women latter. This is actually the same but in the movie it is more in line with the biblical creation of women as companions whereas in Greek Mythology, woman is made as a trick to destroy man.

Ares doesn’t like mankind and thinks they are not that great. Much like Lucifer, as an angel, is not pleased with the creation of man and attempts to prove to God that man is not as good as he thinks.

Adam and Eve and Serpent

There is a great war in the heavens in which Ares finds himself reduced and stuck wandering the earth and whispering in people’s ears, much like a fallen angel and Satan at the serpent.

It doesn’t take much to pull off the veil and reveal that the movie of Wonder Woman took the Biblical creation story and the battle between God and Satan and just switched the names out. It also ignored a dichotomy it created. It the world was a beautiful and peaceful place, why would the gods have a god of war? Even after the creation of man and the gods divided duties, why would they create a god of war over people who were, at least at that time, peaceful?

Did no one else watching the movie see these problems? I can’t be the only one for whom they just leapt up off the screen .

When you follow out this logic, Diana becomes a sort of messianic figure, an allegory for

Birth of Diana

Christ. She was shaped from clay by the queen of the Amazons. Then Zeus breathes life into her. Now this is one of the creation stories for her in the comics. But prior to that, she was shaped from clay by the queen but then each of the different Greek deities then gifts her with something different, like the fairies that attend the christening of Sleeping Beauty, thus making her a child of all the gods and not just the child of Zeus. Her function is to extend the love the Amazon’s are supposed to represent and to fight for peace and to protect the world from evil influences where she finds them.

Clearly, the writers are trying to tell the story of God’s creation, of the fall of the Angels, of the actions of Satan, and of the birth of Christ. All hidden under the guise of Wonder Woman. I am going to guess that this could even be a subconscious reason for the movies popularity among certain groups of people.

HPL often makes the religious most susceptible to madness in his stories. They turn into absolute wrecks when confronted with things out of the ordinary. These things are not supernatural in nature and the person’s religious actions to protect them do not work. His creatures are natural but either ancient, alien, or trans-dimensional. So he is basing his monsters/creatures on science (or science fiction) that we don’t understand. The implication is that religious people are weak minded to start with.
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Yet many times he has people who were more rational and non-religious go to religious authority figures for help when strange things start to happen to them or around them. It is like he is saying that it is human nature to turn to religion when confronted by the unknown or the unknowable. Of course, anything suggested by or provided by these religious figures always fails. HPL’s views of religious are well known.
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His stories reflect a concept that those who are religious and depend on religion to start with are weak minded individuals but even those with stronger mental fortitude will turn to religion when faced with the unknown, that it is basic human nature. But since God doesn’t really exist, religion cannot solve the strange problems caused by life forms that science was unable to identify or that came from other places. But people’s reliance on religion makes using religion an easy way to take over a community in order to control people for ulterior goals.
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In fact, as I sit here running stories through my head, I can only think of one that uses a supernatural horror instead of one that could be considered natural if unknown or unearthly. That is Dreams in the Witch House. There may be others that I would find if I sat down and flipped through more stories. That’s just an off the top of my head recall.
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The fact that his horror seldom uses magical causes actually increases the horror. The idea that the world is much bigger and stranger than we can see in our ordinary reality and those things have no care for the structure of the world as we see it and have created it for ourselves is a more terrifying concept than supernatural horrors.